1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure is related to network communications and more specifically to Video over Ethernet transport in provider networks.
2. Description of the Related Art
The technology of Video over Ethernet (VoE) is affected by and limited by the ability to separate video from standard Ethernet traffic in a reliable manner. Previous iterations of Video over Ethernet required higher layer protocols. That is, layer 2 (Data Link Layer) was not used as a method of segregating Video traffic from standard Ethernet traffic. Because video data flows unidirectionally and at a constant bit rate, any errors which occur during transmission as well as discards due to network congestion are not able to be tolerated. Accordingly, extreme care is necessary in the planning of the network in order to avoid oversubscription with other Ethernet traffic which can trigger network discards and cause video interruptions. The unidirectional nature of the traffic and the necessity to often drop and continue the flows require multicasting of VoE frames from one “add” site to multiple ‘drop” locations requiring a multicast address (Destination Address (DA)) in order to steer traffic around a network. This process however causes inefficiencies in the use of network bandwidth because the traffic may flow to as well as through their intended destinations. In still other applications a unicast of the VoE frames from a single “add” site to a single “drop” site within a network is necessary or desirable. The difficulty is the ability to determine when to switch between multicast or unicast and how to accomplish this switching.
Thus the existing methods of transportation of Video over Ethernet through Ethernet switches using a multicast Destination Address provides inefficient bandwidth use and conversely using only unicast Destination Addresses restricts the usefulness because it inherently removes the drop and continue functionality. Additionally switching between the multicast and unicast mode in existing systems requires manual intervention making it impractical and certainly more difficult to implement on a regular basis.
There is thus a need to provide an automatic mechanism to determine the nature of the required destination address DA (unicast or multicast) and whether the traffic was discard eligible due to the number of destination locations.